Don't racialize mental illness- Providence Journal series

race and mental illness

    Any American socialist would pay close attention to the special problems of different racial and ethnic groups in seeking effective treatment for severe mental illness. In truth our mental health system-our still FOR PROFIT health care system here- has failed everybody. Racializing mental illness is as mistaken as racializing poverty. Most of the homeless mentally ill I have observed on the streets-in Kennedy Plaza in Providence-are white. Indeed most poor people in America are white. In the capitalist news media poor white people have been invisible since the War on Poverty in the LBJ era. We will ALL benefit from real " socialized medicine ". I am sure the Afro-American scholar Ray Rickman is very anti-capitalist -even with his various enterprises. 
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                   MOST POOR PEOPLE ARE WHITE

     "   According to Census figures in 2013, 18.9 million whites are poor. That’s 8 million more poor white people than poor black people, and more than 5 million more than those who identify as Latino. A majority of those benefiting from programs like food stamps and Medicaid are white, too.

But somehow our picture of poverty is different, and the media tends to tell us a different story. A recent New York Times story, “Cut in Food Stamps Forces Hard Choices on Poor,” included only pictures of African Americans and Latinos from the Bronx, N.Y., and a number of Southern states. In October, the Times published another story about the impact of states’ rejection of the Medicaid expansion that’s part of the Affordable Care Act.

The images accompanying that story were also all of black or Latino families. Was that because only blacks and Latinos receive Medicaid? No. "

Most poor people in America are white